Modern computing devices are capable of processing enormous amounts of data via a variety of useful applications that operate as software, firmware and hardware implementations. As data is processed, it is typically written to a temporary memory medium where it may be stored while the associated computing device is powered on or until it is written to a more permanent type of memory where it may be stored indefinitely even after power has been removed from the associated computer or from the memory medium itself. Data that is stored to memory may eventually be output or it may be modified, erased from memory, overwritten, or the like as the data is processed or otherwise manipulated as desired by a user.
Common types of non-volatile memory that maintain data after power-off include hard disk drives that magnetically maintain data on sectors of disks or platters, including higher density disk storage with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives, as well as, a variety of solid state memory devices (SSD) that store data on interconnected memory chips contained inside the SSDs. In a typical data storage system associated with a variety of computing devices, a host operation or device, for example, a computing operating system or a storage system component such as a device driver operating at the command of the computer operating system, passes data storage instructions to a control unit of the storage medium for directing read, write, and erase operations on the storage medium.
In a typical operation, the host may order data updates at relatively small granularities, for example, a first field for a name, a second field for a street address, a third field for a city, and the like. However, when the storage medium, for example, a hard disk drive or solid state memory device, receives a storage command from the host, the medium in use typically erases a large zone (hard disk drive) or block/page (SSD) and then writes the erased area from beginning to end. Unfortunately, such a process often creates complicated side effects and behaviors which may result in inconsistent and inefficient performance, including storage latency spikes, write amplification leading to device media endurance problems, and interference issues when multiple applications and/or tenants are assigned to a single storage medium. Such problems are exacerbated when storage media software or firmware engages in media management activities such as logical to physical storage media mapping, data encryption, error-correcting code (ECC) operations, bad block mapping, wear-leveling, garbage collection, read and write caching, etc.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present disclosure has been made.